Are two Prime Day sales events enough for Amazon?
The following article was previously published on?Forbes.com. It appears here with some minor edits.
Amazon.com, fresh off?last month’s record-setting Prime Day?sales event, said it would run?Prime Big Deal Days?in the U.S., Canada and 17 other countries in October.?
Details on the promotion, limited to Prime members, are practically non-existent as Amazon has not indicated the depth and breadth of deals that will be available or the exact dates the sale will be run.?
Big Deal Days mark the second time Amazon has run two major Prime sales promotions in a calendar year. Amazon last year ran its Prime Early Access Sale in October following its July flagship event.?
Amazon reported that July 11, the first day of the two-day Prime Day promotion, was the biggest sales day in the company’s history as many of its 200 million subscribers found deals on items sold by the e-tail giant and third-party sellers on its marketplace.
Adobe Analytics?pegged Amazon’s Prime Day revenues in the U.S. at $12.7 billion, a 6.1% increase over the 2022 event. Amazon was likely not the only retailer during the Prime Day period with Target, Walmart?and others running overlapping promotions in July.?
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“I think the biggest news of this whole cycle outside of Amazon itself is Walmart decided to counter-program directly against Amazon with Walmart+ week. Last year, they had a Walmart+ weekend in June. It was off-cycle for Prime Day,” Andrew Lipsman, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, recently said on eMarketer’s “Behind the Numbers: Reimagining Retail” podcast.
The continuing success of Prime Day has led to speculation that it may make strategic marketing sense for Amazon to expand its sales event calendar.
“I think the answer is yes, eventually. So what is one that could happen? They've got three times a year, summer, fall and winter holiday (Black Friday and Cyber Monday) already covered. So to me, the obvious one is in the spring.”
Lipsman said a spring home improvement event could be timed for mid-to-late April to include home and garden products promoted by Home Depot, Lowe’s, Wayfair and other retailers.?
“They (Amazon) could build it around the home and garden category. Outdoor furniture can be popular during this. I also think Amazon has a lot of great flagship electronics for the smart home and protecting your home security ring doorbell things of that nature,” said Lipsman.
Amazon will need to be careful not to let customers become desensitized to sales events and to ensure that offers are meaningful.
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1 年Initiating a calendar of sales festivals would help Amazon – and rivals with concurrent events – further grow the top line. Beyond Prime Day, Amazon has already introduced sales events for categories like pets and beauty. ? In China, consumers score deals all year long with sales events like the mid-year 618 festival, Golden Week and Singles Day. Why wouldn’t Amazon bring more e-commerce extravaganzas to the West? More consumers would snag deals, and more brand advertisers would boost awareness and conversions among global online shoppers.
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1 年Prime Day is a highly anticipated day, if Amazon adds too many additional promotional days it runs the risk of over saturation. We all know and love Macy's One Big Day that runs every other week during the holidays. No one really believes the deals are that great.
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1 年I see this as a challenge for Amazon. ?tile Prime Day continues to be successful, what are the products that sell the most each July? It's usually Amazon branded devices, like Fire TV sticks, or Echo Dots, or TVs, and so on. The October event becomes an exercise in pulling holiday sales forward, so it makes sense. A Spring event? Sure it's a big gap on the calendar, but what happens when Fire TVs and Echo Dots are once again the big selling items. Then what sells in July? So long as Amazon works the assortment of what items to promote at each event, and makes them distinguishable enough, it can work. However, I don't see having more than 3 of these in a year. At some point you end up training your customer to just wait until the "next Prime Day event" for all their discretionary purchases! And that's a slippery slope!
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1 年Amazon has a free hand to flex its muscles as long as the company delivers high-demand 'blowout deals' and deep discounts that people have come to expect from its Prime Day events. We may eventually see a quarterly pace of Prime Days. The downside for Amazon is that these become baked into the YoY comps and will be difficult to reduce without a financial market impact.